The Taurobolium was more associated with the worship of Cybele than Mithras. People have made the mistake of associating it with Mithras because of the tauroctony, but there’s no evidence the Mithraics ever did it, and a lot of evidence they didn’t.
Well, I’m NeoPagan, but not Roman NeoPagan so I’m afraid my helpfulness in regard to those questions is pretty much at an end.
Yes and no.
While ritual slaughter for, say, Jews and Muslims is pretty accepted and protected I remember my contacts in the Voudoun and Santeria communities in Chicago having some problems with that (Voudoun, Santeria, and the related African Ife all require animal sacrifice, even more so than Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions. Telling them they can’t sacrifice animals is like telling Catholics they can’t celebrate Mass). I’m not privy to all the details, but apparently by the 1990’s some sort of arrangement had been made between the minority religions and the police/authorities establishing ground rules, but nosy neighbors could still throw a wrench into the works. Establishments that sell live animals for on-site selection and butchering is one source of live animals (obviously, if you’re having a ritual sacrifice you take it home or to the ceremony site for the killing part) and there are also, well, religious supply stores catering to these communities where one can purchase animals of the correct type/color/other attributes for various rituals. Most of these were/are in Hispanic or Haitian neighborhoods. I was aware of one NeoPagan fellow interested in ritual sacrifice and providing such services to the non-latin/non-Haitian NeoPagan communities but that never did work out (internal politics and arguments over whether or not bloodshed was appropriate - many Wiccans said no, the Asatru, were divided, the Kemetics were interested but didn’t want to get involved with anyone else, oh, it got messy!)
While I am not an expect I have been to ceremonies involving ritual animal sacrifice on one or two occasions. As far as I can determine, allowing the animal to suffer needlessly ranged from “bad form” to “endangering the sacred nature of the event”. Sacrifice of life force, blood, meat, etc. was the goal, suffering most assuredly was not. From what I observed part of the goal was to kill swiftly and efficiently, although some of the traditional techniques were not as quick and painless as some modern methods of slaughter. The animals sacrificed were usually (though not always) eaten afterward as part of a community feast.
So, assuming there were a group of Roman NeoPagans wishing to incorporate animal sacrifice or ritual slaughter into their worship or lifestyle it is certainly possible for them to do so although there will probably be regulatory and other hurdles to cross. Keeping a low profile is also advised, because a lot of people just don’t have much understanding of the practice, or find it frightening/revolting.
Um, actually they are called Castanhas-do-Parà in Brazil.
Oh, absolutely, I wasn’t implying they were going to go for making an animal suffer. I’m just saying that that regulations can get somewhat buried and become nigh impossible to get around without very specific equipment or invalidating any way to do it except the way slaughterhouses do it which can put a wrench in anything ceremonial.
Otherwise, thanks for the post.
The original Roman paganism involved reverence for sites within the city of Rome . . . most of which sites have been for centuries part of the disabitio or uninhabited areas of the city, so restoration should present few practical problems.
Nevertheless, bulldozing all those Christian fanes on the ager vaticanus, even though they lie well outside the sacred pomerium should be an essential first step, just on general principles.
Considering how many Christian “fanes” were converted Roman pagan sacred sites, it would make for greater continuity with the past to simply revert some of them.
I’ve known quite a few neopagans over the years, but haven’t personally met any Roman-only neopagans; so I can’t be of specific help there.
A large number of neopagans, however, do invoke the names of Greco-Roman deities in their worship (often in the context of describing the universal Goddess figure, or different aspects of her as related to the specific ceremony/etc. they are performing).
Since there are so many different flavors of neopagans, some people I’ve met also take particular gods/goddesses as their patron, preferring, say, a named Apollo or Aphrodite or Isis or Hermes over simply “Goddess” or a male ur-god like “the horned god.” But few of these people were emphatic about a Roman-only pantheon, or following Roman rites. Most I knew adhered more to the Drawing Down the Moon style of worship–some chants, some dance, some play-acting, some drumming, lots of very Christian-like praying.
So, in your experience, there’s not really an attempt to worship the Roman gods the way they were worshiped? The Roman god/goddess is just put on top of the other Goddess/Horned God archetype?
Actually you could stand a pretty good chance of getting something vaguely approximating the original doctrine of the Pagan Romans. They religion was pretty well documented in the many Roman texts we have.
The problem with Neo-Paganism generally is that its doctrine was never usually written down, so when the last Celtic Pagan died or was converted the doctrine died with them. The doctrine modern Pagans follow was largely invented in the 1800s.
That’s been my experience, yes. I’ve read that others out there have tried to get closer to specific Roman rites (and Egyptian, etc.), but I haven’t met any of those people personally. The neo-Celtic stuff seems to have taken the greatest hold in modern culture, and people seem to modify their worship from there.
Well, it is called neo-paganism. They’re not historic reenactors. (Well, I’m sure some are, but as a hobby.)
Neo-pagans are hardly unique in this regard. Times change. I doubt there are many Christians or Jews who faithfully replicate the behavior and rituals of members of their faith from thousands of years ago. Even the Amish don’t try to live like Christians from circa AD 30.
The Nova Roma community practicices (with how much sincerity, who can say) the Cultus deorum Romanum. There’s an actual project to reconstruct the Palatine Temple of Magna Mater.
Right…but the difference is that those changes, in Christianity and Judaism, are an evolution. You know, the religion existed in one form thousands of years ago, and over time, it just gradually changed. Paganism stopped being practiced, until, more recently, people said "Ok, we’re going to start believing in these pagan gods again and worship them in such and such a way. It was less of a gradual change and much more of a reinvention.
Nova Roma’s purpose is stated as “reconstruction.” It may be that “reconstruction” is closer to re-enactment than it is to neogenesis. The former being a faithful reproduction of the form of the old ways. The latter being a new beginning that is faithful to the spirit of the old ways without necessarily reproducing any ancient forms. Rather a movement of, by, and for today, based on today’s knowledge and living people, that draws inspiration from the ancients.
Reconstruction (like Nova Roma) looks backward to the classical era, or at least the last good configuration, of something before it declined and fell. It’s a response to the death of the tradition, an embalmed tradition.
Neoteric religion (like the neo-Pagan originators) looks forward to the freedom of creating new beginnings, whose connection to the ancient is through this cyclical new birth, a return to the spirit that had formed early religions in the first place. It’s connected to the life they still find in the old ways. Like how the life returns to earth in spring after winter. I know of a neopagan group that feels connected in spirit to the Great Mother, one of the principle deities of Rome who was called Magna Mater in Latin, but without reconstructing the whole form of Her cultus literally. The neopagan group sees itself more as a product of, and a participant in, women’s spirituality of the present day, which is the matrix of so many neopagan groups. They have been in discussion with Nova Roma about the religion they both align themselves with, and relations are cordial, but the two groups approach the issue in very different ways-- hopefully complementary ways.
This is why I enjoy reading the dope.
Yes, and that’s why they’re called neo-pagans.
Let’s all calm down.
The vast majority of Neo-Pagan and Wiccans do not believe in their gods in a “these guys actually walked the earth” way. Most people (who aren’t just crazy) recognize these gods are archetypes or metaphors. Much like many nominal Christians accept that Christ’s teachings had wisdom and his story has some meaning, but he probably wasn’t really the son of God. So they may pray to a particular God to invoke the qualities that God represents, without actually believing in that God in a literal way.
Actually, most of the “neo-Celtic” stuff is about as Celtic as it is Roman or Egyptian. Usually, it’s Celtic names slapped onto a generic Wicca.
In Chicago there IS a group of Kemetic (Egyptian) worshippers who seek to reconstruct rather than making stuff up out of whoe cloth, the House of Netjer and the Kemetic Orthodoxy, headed by Tamara Siuda who has a master’s in Egyptology, reads hieroglyphics, and was supposedly once asked to leave the Oriental Institute in Chicago because her prostration/adoration in front of the images of the gods was, apparently, unsettling to the guards present. She’s quite sincere in what she is doing. She does acknowledge that they can’t entirely reconstruct the ancient religion, but also points out that worship in Ancient Egypt did change over time and what they seek to do is bring the traditions forward. We’re not going to have a pharaoh in modern times, after all, but there are other aspects of Kemetic worship that they say can be adopted and practiced.
I’ve met Rev. Siuda and about a dozen or so of her followers personally. They’re acquaintances, not friends, but they most certainly aren’t Wiccans (though some of them used to be), or “neoCeltic”. So yes, those sorts of folks really do exist.
Judaism, in fact, had the same problem that someone trying to worship the Roman gods as they were once worshipped would now. Our Temple was destroyed in 70 AD, and after that we couldn’t do a lot of the things that had historically been how Judaism was practiced. We had to make changes so that we could still practice Judaism without the Temple.
At Yom Kippur, for example, my (Conservative) synagogue has in the holiday prayer book a passage describing the Yom Kippur service as it was performed by the High Priest in the days of the Temple. We read this passage during our Yom Kippur services, since we can’t perform the ceremony itself. I suppose Roman neopagans could do something like that for ceremonies they can’t perform any more, if they wanted to.